210Suffering engenders passion; and while the prosperous blind themselves, or go to sleep, the hatred of the unfortunate classes kindles its torch at some sullen or ill-constituted mind, which is dreaming in a corner, and sets to work to examine society. The examination of hatred is a terrible thing.” Suffering begets rage, and while the prosperous turn a blind eye, or nod off which is always the same thing as shutting your eyes, the hate of the prosperous masses has hits torch lit by some malcontent or warped mind dreaming away in a corner, somewhere, and it begins to examine society. Examination by hate is a terrible thing.

— Victor Hugo

A certain amount of reverie is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses. It soothes the fever, occasionally high, of the brain at work, and produces in the mind a soft, fresh vapor that corrects the all too angular contours of pure thought, fills up the gaps and intervals here and there, binds them together, and dulls the sharp corners of ideas. But too much reverie submerges and drowns. Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie its pleasure. To replace thought with reverie is to confound poison with nourishment.

— Victor Hugo

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

— Victor Hugo

A criminal remains a criminal whether he uses a convict's suit or a monarch's crown.

— Victor Hugo

A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas.

— Victor Hugo

Admirable, however, as the Paris of the present day appears to you, build up and put together again in imagination the Paris of the fifteenth century; look at the light through that surprising host of steeples, towers, and belfries; pour forth amid the immense city, break against the points of its islands, compress within the arches of the bridges, the current of the Seine, with its large patches of green and yellow, more changeable than a serpent's skin; define clearly the Gothic profile of this old Paris upon a horizon of azure, make its contour float in a wintry fog which clings to its innumerable chimneys; drown it in deep night, and observe the extraordinary play of darkness and light in this somber labyrinth of buildings; throw into it a ray of moonlight, which shall show its faint outline and cause the huge heads of the towers to stand forth from amid the mist; or revert to that dark picture, touch up with shade the thousand acute angles of the spires and gables, and make them stand out, more jagged than a shark's jaw, upon the copper-colored sky of evening. Now compare the two.

— Victor Hugo

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.

— Victor Hugo

A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing.

— Victor Hugo

After he had fully determined that the young man was at the bottom of this state of affairs, and that it all came from him, he Jean Val jean, the regenerated man, the man who had labored so much upon his soul, the man who had made so many efforts to resolve all life, all misery, and all misfortune into love; he looked within himself, and there he saw a specter, Hatred.

— Victor Hugo

A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in--what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars.

— Victor Hugo